A Parsimonious Description of Global Functional Brain Organization in Three Spatiotemporal Patterns

• Published in: bioRxiv
• Main Authors: Bolt, Taylor S, Nomi, Jason, Bzdok, Danilo, Salas, Jorge A, Chang, Catie, Yeo, Bt Thomas, Uddin, Lucina Q, Keilholz, Shella
• Format: Paper
• Language: English
• Published: Cold Spring Harbor Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 10.06.2022
• Subjects: Brain architecture; Brain mapping; Community structure; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Functional morphology; Neural networks
• DOI: 10.1101/2021.06.20.448984

Resting-state functional MRI has yielded seemingly disparate insights into large-scale organization of the human brain. The brain's large-scale organization can be divided into two broad categories - zero-lag representations of functional connectivity structure and time-lag representations of traveling wave or propagation structure. Here we sought to unify observed phenomena across these two categories in the form of three low-frequency spatiotemporal patterns composed of a mixture of standing and traveling wave dynamics. We showed that a range of empirical phenomena, including functional connectivity gradients, the task-positive/task-negative anti-correlation pattern, the global signal, time-lag propagation patterns, the quasiperiodic pattern, and the functional connectome network structure are manifestations of these three spatiotemporal patterns. These patterns account for much of the global spatial structure that underlies functional connectivity analyses, and unifies phenomena in resting-state functional MRI previously thought distinct. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes * Major revision - reduction of main text, new null model analyses * https://github.com/tsb46/BOLD_WAVES